Witness
October 14, 2007
Reading project #2 for the summer just past was WITNESS by Whittaker Chambers, 50th Anniversary Edition. I had some dim recollection of hearing about the microfilms hidden in a pumpkin and the Alger Hiss spy trials in the 1940s, but, after all, a 9-year-old can only be expected to remember so much. So I opened the 800 page paperback with anticipation. I was on a roll after finishing Victor Hugo’s 1500-word classic, Les Misérables.
In a forward, William F. Buckley Jr. had this to say about Whittaker Chambers.
I first met Whittaker Chambers in 1954. An almost total silence had closed in on him. Two years earlier he had published Witness. When the preface of Witness appeared as a feature in the Saturday Evening Post, that issue of the magazine sold a startling half million extra copies on the newsstand. The book came out with a great flurry. The bitterness of the Alger Hiss trial had not subsided. For some of the reviewers, Hiss’s innocence had once been a fixed national conviction, then blind faith; and now, after the publication of that overwhelming book, rank superstition.
In a second forward, Robert D. Novak stated,
The death of Alger Hiss at the age of ninety-two on November 15, 1996, provoked bizarre responses from people who should have known better.
…It is remarkable that, nearly a half-century after Hiss’s conviction, well-informed and presumably prudent people could still harbor any doubts that Hiss, as a senior State Department official, had in fact been a secret agent of the Fourth Section of Soviet Military Intelligence. Yet Mr. [Peter] Jennings and Mr. [Anthony] Lake represent many others who cannot fully accept the reality that Alger Hiss was lying and Whittaker Chambers was telling the truth.
Chambers 
Hiss
So what did I think? Well, author Chambers could have used a good editor and proof reader, but that aside it is a captivating autobiography. Chambers was a more-or-less practicing Quaker who was naive enough to testify without a lawyer at his side, believing that words of truth made their own witness. Hiss, on the other hand, was surrounded by advisors, legal and otherwise, and talked way too much. He was a name-dropper, saying that any man (himself) thought highly of by all the movers and shakers in Washingtom just must be telling the truth. Not, as it turned out. Here’s a story where the good guy came out on top.
Two more reflections that may or may not whet your interest: Chambers opened his story in “Forward In The Form Of A Letter To My Children.”
[The Hiss Case] was more than human tragedy. Much more than Alger Hiss or Whittaker Chambers was on trial … . Two faiths were on trial. Human societies, like human beings, live by faith, and die when faith dies. At issue in the Hiss Case was the question whether this sick society, which we call Western civilization, could in its extremity still cast up a man whose faith in it was so great that he would voluntarily abandon those things which men hold good, including life, to defend it.
My next comment is that the most riveting parts of the book are nothing but barely edited transcripts of congressional investigations.
Mr. Hiss: (Said this…)
Mr. Nixon: (Said this..)
Hard to believe, perhaps, but the knowledge that these were not words put in the mouth of a protagonist by an imaginative author has impact. He really said that!
Recommended reading, nonetheless. It’s a fascinating part of our history when Soviet Communists had much influence in Washington, and we did not want to believe it until an unexciting Quaker sacrificed himself on the altar of truth.
Dave, glad to be part of the American Experiment.
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Good review, Dad! I’ll have to read that book.
Piqued my interest and went to Amazon. A review there by Orrin Judd, the first one, had a good excerpt from the letter to his children in the forward. Interesting. I didn’t know anything about the trial, did I learn something about it in history!? Uh…. 30+ years ago? Dunno
Witness is sitting on the shelf waiting for someone to pick it up and read it. I think you might enjoy it. It provides some interesting details about the everyday life of the Quakers and the world of 1940s style congressional investigations. The Hiss trial, by the way, was what kicked off Richard Nixon’s political career. But you don’t remember “tricky Dick.”